expression, Poussin for composition--all being alike to him, provided there was a word to express it, for all he thought about was his own harangue; and, having consulted some friend on his progress, he returned to 'perfectionate,' as he called it, his copy. This would drive an Englishman mad or stupid. The perseverance and the indifference, the labour without impulse, the attention to the parts in succession, and disregard of the whole together, are to him absolutely inconceivable. A Frenchman only exists in his present sensations, and provided he is left free to these as they arise, he cares about nothing farther, looking neither backward nor forward. With all this affectation and artifice, there is on this account a kind of simplicity and nature about them, after all. They lend themselves to the impression before them with good humour and good will, making it neither better nor worse than it is. The English overdo or underdo everything, and are either drunk or in despair. I do not speak of all Frenchmen or of all Englishmen, but of the most characteristic specimens of each class. The extreme slowness and methodical regularity of the French has arisen out of this indifference, and even frivolity (their usually-supposed natural character), for owing to it their laborious minuteness costs them nothing; they have no strong impulses or ardent longings that urge them to the violation of rules, or hurry them away with a subject and with the interest belonging to it. Everything is matter of calculation, and measured beforehand, in order to assist their fluttering and their feebleness. When they get beyond the literal and the formal, and attempt the impressive and the grand, as in David's and Girardot's pictures, defend us from sublimity heaped on insipidity and petit-maîtreism. You see a Frenchman in the Louvre copying the finest pictures, standing on one leg, with his hat on; or after copying a Raphael, thinking David much finer, more truly one of themselves, more a combination of the Greek sculptor and the French posture-master. Even if a French artist fails, he is not disconcerted; there is something else he excels in: if he cannot paint, he can dance! If an Englishman, save the mark! fails in anything, he thinks he can do nothing; enraged at the mention of his ability to do anything else, and at any consolation offered to him, he banishes all other thought but of his disappointment, and discarding hope from his breast, neither eats nor sleeps (it is well if he does not cut his throat), will not attend to any other thing in which he before took an interest and pride, and is in despair till he recovers his good opinion of himself in the point in which he has been disgraced, though, from his very anxiety and disorder of mind, he is incapacitated from applying to the only means of doing so, as much as if he were drunk with liquor, instead of with pride and passion. The character I have here drawn of an Englishman I am clear about, for it